Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday December 23, 2012 @12:22PM
from the just-bite-the-corner-a-little dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Any Slashdot thread about drive failure is loaded with good advice about EOL — but what about the beginning? Do you normally test your new purchases as thoroughly as you test old, suspect drives? Has your testing followed the proverbial 'bathtub' curve of a lot of early failures, but with those that survive the first month surviving for years? And have you had any return problems with new failed drives, because you re-partitioned it, or 'ran Linux,' or used stress-test apps?"

Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday December 23, 2012 @03:43AM
from the best-way-to-document-an-avalanche dept.

MojoKid writes "The initial wearable cameras [GoPro founder Nick] Woodman created to capture action shots as they happened used 35mm film, but his company's cameras have evolved into highly durable, HD vid-cams that are sought after by amateurs and extreme sports stars alike. It turns out Foxconn digs what GoPro has designed as well. The giant Taiwanese manufacturer just bought a significant stake in Woodman Labs, making Nick Woodman a billionaire in the processes. Taiwan-headquartered electronics manufacturer Foxconn (also known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co.), purchased an 8.88% stake in Woodman Labs for $200 million, valuing the San Mateo, Calif. company at $2.25 billion."

Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday December 22, 2012 @05:29PM
from the two-slices-of-cherry-and-a-pumpkin dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Everyone has seen Raspberry Pi Computer, the credit card sized mini PC circuit board that costs only $35. Now there is a new Mobile Raspberry Pi called Pi-to-Go, with a mini LCD, 10-hour battery, and 64GB SSD, all packed together in a 3D printed case. See if you are up to the task to build your own."

Posted
by
timothy
on Friday December 21, 2012 @08:39PM
from the some-good-some-bad dept.

J. Dzhugashvili writes "As Slashdot noted earlier this week, AMD has a new line of mid-range Radeon GPUs aimed at notebooks. The chips are based on the Graphics Core Next microarchitecture, and they're slated to show up in systems early next year. While the initial report was limited to specification details, the first review of the Radeon HD 8790M is now out, complete with benchmark data from the latest games. The 8790M is about 35% smaller than its 7690M predecessor but offers substantially better gaming performance across the board. Impressively, the new chip has similar power draw as the outgoing model under load, and its idle power consumption is slightly lower. Notebook makers should have no problems making the switch. However, it is worth noting that this new mobile GPU exhibits some of the same frame latency spikes observed on desktop Radeons, including in games that AMD itself has sponsored."

Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday December 21, 2012 @04:32PM
from the mad-scientist's-green-revolution dept.

cylonlover writes "Tornadoes generally evoke the destructive force of nature at its most awesome. However, what if all that power could be harnessed to produce cheaper and more efficient electricity? This is just what Canadian engineer Louis Michaud proposes to achieve, with an invention dubbed the 'Atmospheric Vortex Engine' (or AVE). It works by introducing warm air into a circular station, whereupon the difference in temperature between this heated air and the atmosphere above creates a vortex – or controlled tornado, which in turn drives multiple wind turbines in order to create electricity. The vortex could be shut down by simply turning off the source of warm air. Michaud's company, AVEtec Energy Corporation, reports that the system produces no carbon emissions, nor requires energy storage to function, and that further to this, the cost of energy generated could potentially be as low as US$0.03 per kilowatt hour."

Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday December 20, 2012 @10:48AM
from the we-figure-cut-the-red-fire-first dept.

"Start thinking about getting your tinfoil hat radiation hardened," writes an anonymous reader, and excerpts thus from ABC News: "Southern Co. in Georgia and SCANA Corp. in South Carolina are the first to prepare new workers to run a recently approved reactor design never before built in the United States. Training like it will be repeated over the decades-long lifetime of those plants and at other new ones that may share the technology in years to come. Both power companies are building pairs of Westinghouse Electric Corp. AP1000 reactors at Plant Vogtle near Augusta and SCANA Corp.'s Summer Nuclear Station northwest of Columbia, S.C. While the nuclear industry had earlier proposed a larger building campaign, low natural gas prices coupled with uncertainty after last year's disaster at a Japanese nuclear plant have scaled back those ambitions." Getting a new nuclear plant approved is a long haul.

Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday December 20, 2012 @08:03AM
from the right-to-print-arms dept.

Sparrowvsrevolution writes in with a story at Forbes about Makerbot deleting gun component blueprints on Thingiverse. "In the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut shootings, the 3D-printing firm Makerbot has deleted a collection of blueprints for gun components from Thingiverse, its popular user-generated content website that hosts 3D-printable files. Though Thingiverse has long banned designs for weapons and their components in its terms of service, it rarely enforced the rule until the last few days, when the company's lawyer sent notices to users that their software models for gun parts were being purged from the site. Gun control advocates were especially concerned about the appearance of lower receivers for semi-automatic weapons that have appeared on Thingiverse. The lower receiver is the the 'body' of a gun, and its most regulated component. So 3D-printing that piece at home and attaching other parts ordered by mail might allow a lethal weapon to be obtained without any legal barriers or identification. Makerbot's move to delete those files may have been inspired in part by a group calling itself Defense Distributed, which announced its intention to create an entirely 3D-printable gun in August and planned to potentially upload it to Thingiverse. Defense Distributed says it's not deterred by Makerbot's move and will host the plans on its own site."

Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday December 19, 2012 @04:38PM
from the much-more-reliable-than-Thor-power dept.

MrSeb writes "If you've not been tracking the thorium hype, you might be interested to learn that the benefits liquid fluoride thorium reactors (LFTRs) have over light water uranium reactors (LWRs) are compelling. Alvin Weinberg, who invented both, favored the LFTR for civilian power since its failures (when they happened) were considerably less dramatic — a catastrophic depressurization of radioactive steam, like occurred at Chernobyl in 1986, simply wouldn't be possible. Since the technical hurdles to building LFTRs and handling their byproducts are in theory no more challenging, one might ask — where are they? It turns out that a bunch of U.S. startups are investigating the modern-day viability of thorium power, and countries like India and China have serious, governmental efforts to use LFTRs. Is thorium power finally ready for prime time?"

Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday December 19, 2012 @12:10AM
from the open-success dept.

ptorrone writes "Limor 'Ladyada' Fried of open-source hardware company Adafruit Industries was awarded Entrepreneur of the Year by Entrepreneur Magazine. From the article: 'Recognizable by her signature vivid-pink locks, Fried (or Ladyada, as she is known on the internet) is one of the dominant forces behind the maker movement--a legion of do-it-yourself-minded folks who create cool things by tweaking everyday technology. Last year New York City-based Adafruit did a booming $10 million trade in sales of DIY open-source electronic hardware kits.'"

Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Monday December 17, 2012 @06:47PM
from the just-the-way-you-like-it dept.

New submitter mihai.todor85 writes "It looks like Andrew 'bunnie' Huang has been quite busy lately, developing a nice open hardware laptop. He was even kind enough to provide all the schematics without NDA. For anybody interested in owning such a device, he says that he 'might be convinced to try a Kickstarter campaign in several months, once the design is stable and tested' if enough people are interested."

Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday December 17, 2012 @03:38PM
from the future-is-now dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes "Tech icon Steve Wozniak has come forward with several predictions for 2013, with data center technologies an important part of the list. Wozniak's predictions are based on a series of conversations he had recently with Brett Shockley, senior vice president and general manager of applications and emerging technologies at Avaya. They trace an arc from the consumer space up through the enterprise, with an interesting take on the BYOD phenomenon: Woz believes that mobile devices will eventually become the 'remote controls,' so to speak, of the world. Although he's most famous as the co-founder of Apple, Wozniak currently serves as chief scientist at Fusion-io, a manufacturer of enterprise flash storage for data centers and other devices."

Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday December 17, 2012 @02:08PM
from the back-in-business dept.

An anonymous reader writes in with a story about speculation that Japan might restart its nuclear power program. "Japan's newly-elected Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), a strong supporter of atomic energy use in the past, should restart plants shut after the world's worst nuclear crisis in 25 years, said the CEO of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd .
The LDP, headed by Japan's next prime minister Shinzo Abe, won a landslide victory on Sunday, fueling speculation that the new coalition government would take a softer stance on nuclear power. Public opinion remains divided on the role of atomic energy after natural disasters last year triggered a radiation crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi plant."

Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday December 16, 2012 @10:20PM
from the thinking-different dept.

hugheseyau writes "Dell vice chairman Jeff Clarke made a less than shocking announcement at this year's Dell World Conference in Austin. The company is officially giving up on Android phones and tablets. ... So if Dell is giving up on Android, what comes next? The company claims it's doubling down on Windows 8, and the enterprise market."

Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday December 16, 2012 @04:35PM
from the goodwill-trip-justified dept.

skade88 writes "If you are like me, the proud owner of a Radeon card, and feeling left out of the Linux graphics driver revolution that swept Nvidia cards recently, then stay tuned — there might be hope for us seeing better graphics performance in the Linux 3.8 kernel."

Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday December 15, 2012 @04:18PM
from the strong-enough-to-stand-on dept.

Engadget reports that former MakerBot employee Sam Cervantes has brought to market — or at least to Engadget headquarters in prototype form — a working, cheap(ish) 3D printer from his own company Solidoodle. Originally, the new Solidoodle 3 printer was announced at $500; the price has crept up to $800, but that still sounds like a bargain in the world of home fabrication. Unlike the current MakerBot, it has no built-in card slot, so a computer connection is required for the length of a build.

Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday December 15, 2012 @02:20PM
from the wish-I-was-the-right-age dept.

First time accepted submitter michaelknauf writes "I'm running a large summer camp that's primarily concerned with performing arts: music, dance, circus, magic, theater, art, and I want to add some more tech into the program. We already do some iOS game design with Stencyl. We also have an extensive model railroad and remote control car program and a pretty big computer lab (about 100 Apple machines). Our program provides all materials as part of tuition, so I've stayed away from robotics as a matter of cost, but I'd love to buy a 3D printer and do classes with that and the Arduino is cheap enough to make some small electronics projects sensible... where do I find the sort of people who could teach such a program as a summer gig? What projects make sense without spending too much cash on a per project basis but would be cool fun for kids and would teach them?"

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